Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  Today it was different. Today’s fear was sharp and focused and came from within the stadium, beyond the curved windowless walls, and it was crafty and cruel, a foe that meant to outwit and inveigle. Cass made a small, low humming in her throat, gathering her anxiety into a single strand and twisting it out of the way.

  She was so focused on her own fear that she didn’t hear the far-off wail for a moment, but it escalated sharply and pierced her consciousness.

  “Sounds like they got one,” Faye said, pausing to listen. Cass looked down the street that angled away from the stadium toward the center of town, following Faye’s lead, and thought she saw a bobbing point of light.

  “Got what?”

  “A Beater. They’ve got this cart thing-it’s like a dog-catcher van.”

  “You mean they catch them alive?”

  “Yeah.” Faye laughed softly. “C’mon, I told you they’re fucking lunatics in there.”

  “Wait, so you’re saying the Order…”

  “They don’t do it themselves. They pay Dor and he sends a team out. They’ve pretty much cleaned out the town but every once in a while you’ll get a few that wander in. Usually they can only catch one and have to kill the rest.”

  Cass edged back a step, toward the stadium.

  Other people had hunted the Beaters, back at the beginning. But when it became clear how hard it was to kill them, most people gave up. They were just so relentless. An ordinary human would stop if he took a bullet or a face full of acid or, in the case of the more resourceful citizens who didn’t have access to anything else, a thrown hatchet or a rock flung from a sling.

  But Beaters, when they came close to a potential victim, were almost unstoppable. They didn’t seem to react to pain or injury unless it was mortal, and even in their death throes they would keep advancing. Everyone had a story of a Beater with a crushed skull or a severed limb spending its dying moment dragging itself toward its prey.

  Too often it bit before it died.

  “Isn’t that…crazy?”

  “They have gear.” Faye shrugged. “Protective masks and all. Shit from the manufacturing plant. And if you know Dor, you know he believes in outgunning the enemy. They’re armed from here to Sunday.”

  “But what do they do with them? I mean, the ones they catch?”

  “That’s their business,” Faye said. “Some crazy ritual shit, is what I heard. Who cares? They pay out the ass.”

  Cass followed Faye across the street and along the broad sidewalk that circled the stadium, glancing back once, but the light had been extinguished and all was silent. When Faye stopped at a boarded-up entrance that looked like every other one and knocked on the nailed-down plywood, there was a click above their heads. Cass looked up to see a small window cut into the wall sliding open.

  “Weapons?” a female voice demanded.

  Faye slid her revolver from its holster. “Just the usual.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “Wannabe. She’s from Mariposa, showed up yesterday.”

  The story they’d come up with was that Cass had worked in a church-run child care center Before and missed the structure and leadership of the church, that she hoped to find a faith community from which she could help bring a set of guiding beliefs to Aftertime survivors. Cass had been skeptical that anyone would believe her, but Faye said most of the women being turned away didn’t bother to disguise the fact that they were just looking for shelter.

  “They want sheep, not opportunists. Act all pious and hungry for the light and whatever, convince them they can mold you, and you’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t believe anyone would sign up for something like that on purpose.”

  “Well, people are desperate to believe in something,” Faye said matter-of-factly. “You got a cult situation, it don’t matter what they’re selling. What people are buying is a chance to belong to something, for someone to tell them what to do so they don’t have to think for themselves. Just like the fuckers who started this whole mess, trying to force their ideologies down other people’s throats and getting everyone killed instead.”

  The plywood barrier slid open, its soundless, smooth glide hinting at well-oiled hardware and expert craftsmanship. It closed as soon as they stepped inside, and they found themselves in a small antechamber that still held the detritus of ball games played long ago, red-and-silver posters and pennants and a desk inscribed with the Miners’ logo.

  Two women waited, tensed and ready, in the small room. A short brunette with a strawberry birthmark on her cheek trained a gun on Cass, and a wiry young woman with crooked teeth regarded them from the raised platform that had allowed her to look out of the peephole. Both were dressed simply, in long-sleeved pink shirts and skirts that hung past their knees, their hair pulled back from their faces.

  “Hey,” Faye said by way of greeting. “Lorrie, Jennie, this is Cass.”

  “Take off your belts and packs,” the guard with the gun ordered, ignoring the greeting. “Stand against the wall.”

  Cass followed Faye’s lead, resisting the temptation to watch as the woman went through her things. While the dark-haired guard finished the pack check, the blonde frisked Cass quickly, mostly patting around her pockets and checking her shoes and bra, and Cass gritted her teeth to keep from reacting when she patted down her scarred back.

  “Okay. You can relax. You’ll get your things back later, after your interview.”

  “This what we asked for?” the first guard demanded as she hefted a small, paper-wrapped package that she’d taken from Faye’s pack.

  “Yes. Plus a little extra insurance.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Faye nodded. “Check it out after I leave, make sure it gets where it’s going. The rest is for you, but I couldn’t get the menthols. Just the Light 120’s. Maybe next week.”

  The guard nodded and slipped the package into her skirt pocket. “I appreciate it.”

  “Likewise.”

  Cigarettes. In contrast to the drugs Dor moved inside the Box, the idea seemed almost quaint to Cass. It was ironic, how fiercely California had fought smokers Before, banning them from every square foot of public space. Now, something that could kill you over decades seemed like a good bet. Hell, maybe she ought to take up smoking herself now-odds were she’d be dead long before her lungs could fail her.

  But no-there would be no cigarettes for Cass, nothing that would build a taste for her addictions. Nothing that would remind her of those feelings, of wanting more and more until wanting became needing. In the past, she’d let her addiction become the thing that mattered most, and she’d lost Ruthie as a result. No more. Even if she had only hours left to live, she didn’t intend to spend any of them enslaved to anyone or anything.

  She had made it this far. This much closer to finding Ruthie. And she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their future together.

  “Thank you for bringing me,” she said to Faye, as sweetly as she could manage. “And God bless you.”

  The look the Order guards exchanged was laced with cynicism, but they said nothing.

  Cass was pretending to look for answers. And they were pretending they had answers to give her.

  Good. So far, everyone was playing their part.

  33

  BEYOND THE ANTEROOM WAS A BANK OF elevators that no longer worked-and a stairwell that led up five flights to a hallway that opened onto the skyboxes on one side, and offices on the other. Cass was taken to an office with a view out over the parking lot scattered with wrecked and abandoned cars. The door clicked shut behind her and the room was silent as a stone-soundproofed, she guessed, so some pencil pusher could attend to the details of running the place without distractions. There were bookshelves, a couple of chairs, a corkboard that took up most of one wall-a drab little room like in any anonymous office building. The room where business was consolidated from the sport spectacle of the rest of the stadium.

  When Cass had come here as a girl, she’d been hi
gh on the thrill of a stolen day with her dad. An adventure, just the two of them-the first of many, he promised. She wasn’t about to believe that; her mom said Tom Haverford was about as reliable as a busted clock, and he’d missed her birthday and Easter, off touring with the latest sure-thing band he’d hooked up with.

  But at least there was this one perfect day: the snap of the tickets tearing, the shouts of the vendors cooking up sweetsmelling sausages. The heart-pounding first glimpse of the players in their tight white pants and red-and-silver shirts as they ran onto the field. Sitting close to your dad, his arm heavy around your shoulders, his high-five slap stinging your palm when Hugo Hawkins stole second. Wishing the game would never end.

  Two lives later, Cass knew that baseball was a business just like everything else. Behind the handsome players and the green-green field and the cheering crowds were managers, bosses, arrangers of deliveries and collectors of profits, people who hired and fired and balanced budgets and greased palms and traded influence. Someone like that had worked in this office, and, because of that, the magic of that long-ago day never seemed more distant than it did now.

  Finally the door opened and a woman in a pink skirt and blouse entered. She looked like she was somewhere in her thirties, with straight dark hair tucked primly behind her ears, but her wide smile was welcoming and generous. She extended both her hands and Cass let her enfold her own in a tight grasp.

  “I’m Deacon Lily,” she said softly. She had the kind of voice you leaned in to hear. “Welcome to the Order. You and I are going to have a nice chat and get to know each other, and then together we will decide if you are suited for life here among the Order. If the answer is yes, you will join the other neophytes. You will stay among them until we determine that you are ready to progress to acolyte status. That may take weeks, or perhaps months. It depends on how quickly you learn and adjust to our ways.”

  “What if I’m…not suited?” Cass asked.

  “Oh, let’s not worry about that right now. Besides, you’ve already gotten Sister Lorrie’s recommendation. She can be quite discerning, and generally when she sees potential in a seeker, there is a good reason.”

  Cass searched Lily’s face for sarcasm but found none. “She was very…all-business,” she said carefully.

  Lily waved her hand, brushing the thought away. “The ones who interface with the outside, they have a hard job. Mother Cora says they have to steel themselves against the lure of the godless while keeping their hearts open to the possibility of grace, which is a very difficult calling. That is why only a few are called to be guards. Don’t let her attitude put you off, because she is only protecting our sanctum from those who would seek to weaken us. Now you are inside, with us, and very soon you will start to see the beautiful truths that guide us.”

  Cass nodded and smiled as though Lily’s words made sense, wondering if she really believed what she was saying.

  Cass was intimately familiar with the many faces of denial, from the first whispers that allow you to shade the truth a complexion that suited you, to the most desperate and fantastic depths in which you traded your sanity for a version of reality that allowed you to continue to exist another day.

  But contentment, even serenity, was not a state she associated with any place on the spectrum.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard about the Order,” Lily prompted, sitting in the chair behind the desk and taking a yellow pad and pen from a drawer.

  “I heard this was a good place when you think you can’t go on anymore,” Cass said tremulously. Then she told the rest of her careful lie, one she had built from pieces of the truth. “I lived with my mother, when I was growing up. And…my stepfather.”

  Just saying the hated word caused a bit of the anguish that simmered deep inside to break off and lodge in her heart. She felt her face color with shame and grief, and blinked hard so she wouldn’t cry.

  This was why Cass had chosen this story; she knew she couldn’t tell it without the pain coming to the surface. She wouldn’t have to fool anyone-her desolation was real. And real was the thing she would trade to get inside, no matter what it cost her.

  “Yes?” Lily said softly.

  “My stepfather was not a good man,” Cass continued, her voice quavering. “He was also…inappropriate. With me.”

  “I’m very, very sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. He-” Cass broke off and Lily reached into the desk, coming up with a box of tissues-a practically new box of real tissues, which she slid across the desk. Cass gratefully took one and dabbed at her eyes. “I suppose you can guess. Anyway, I was estranged from them, but they lived in the same town as I did. After the Siege, I heard through friends that my mother had the fever.”

  “Oh, Cassandra…again, I am so sorry,” Lily said, and for a moment Cass was drawn into her sympathy, tempted to tell her all about Mim, about her birdlike hands and diet of coffee and melba toast, her vanity about her size-six figure and the high heels she wore until the very end, even if she was just going to get the mail. About the padded bras she gave Cass for her eleventh birthday; about the way the bedroom door sounded when she slammed it shut the night Cass tried to tell her about what Byrn had done to her.

  Instead she told the lies she had prepared.

  “I loved my mother so much. When she was dying…and she was so hot, it was as though she was on fire from the inside. She couldn’t bear to have anything touching her skin and so she lay on the floor, on the tile, and when I tried to give her water she just-she couldn’t keep it down. And she was muttering all the time…she never slept, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t tell what she was saying and…”

  Cass peeked out from her lowered lashes to see how her story was going over. In truth, she had taken the details from a woman she met in the library; Cass had listened while the woman told the story of her mother’s death in her arms, how she’d held her until finally the unbearable heat left her wasted body. Cass’s own mother had refused to see her, even when she was dying of the fever.

  But Lily reached across the table and squeezed Cass’s hand gently. “Right now, it is natural that you are hurting, that you are questioning God’s decision to take your mother from you,” she said. “But others have found comfort through a deeper understanding of His will and His ways. You can find that comfort in faith, too, Cassandra. Do you believe me?”

  Cass fluttered her lashes. “I…don’t know.”

  “So many of us have lost loved ones to the fever, to hunger, to senseless violence, to the Beaters. The loss is real, of course. But the anger it causes is not. You think you are angry at God for taking your mother, right?”

  Cass nodded. She didn’t say that she was no longer the person she used to be before Byrn came along. He changed her forever when he intercepted her on her way to the bathroom one night after she’d stayed up too late studying for a biology test. He’d traded her trust for a few cheap thrills, pretending that his hands on the thin fabric of her nightgown had been in her imagination, forcing her to scab over her pain with self-doubt. Until it happened the next time. And the time after that.

  That person-the old Cass-truly was dead. And the new Cass was angry. And no new-age faith-hawker was going to take her rage away. But Cass took those thoughts and carefully folded them, once, twice, until they fit back into the place where she kept them hidden away. Their energy, though, she summoned to feed this lie.

  “What if I told you that you can learn to trade your anger for forgiveness?” Lily asked. “For peace? For healing?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes. I know it’s hard to accept at first.” Here it comes, Cass thought, the hard sell. “At first there were only a few of us, women just like you, Cassandra. We were all hurting. We had all lost someone. We found our way here, and we prayed without ceasing. Faith was our only reward, but what a glorious reward it was. Mother Cora founded the Order in this place in the end days of the Siege, when all the nations of the earth were at
war with each other, and she prayed until she was exhausted and then slept only long enough to get up and do it again. Her first acolytes were women who were also looking for answers through faith, and they began to pray with her, and that allowed her to divide the work of her prayer into shifts. Now-” Lily swept her hand in an arc toward the interior of the stadium “-now there are dozens of us praying at every moment of the day. And that’s not all.”

  The enthusiasm in her voice was too bright, too brittle. The pitch was well-practiced, and Cass could understand how easily a woman weakened by grief and fear could fall for it, but underneath Lily’s pious words, the pieces didn’t fit together. Cass focused on Lily’s mouth, her bowed, pale lips. “What else?”

  “Tell me, Cassandra, is there room in your heart to forgive?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “There is a lesson in the Bible, one of my favorites-and also one of the simplest. In it, we learn that our Lord expects us to take the traveler into our home, the sinner to our bosom.” She tapped her fingernails on the desk as she recited: “I say to you, what you have done to one of these least ones, you have done to Me.”

  Cass knew the passage well, from a long-ago game in church camp. The disinterested counselors made the girls form two lines, linking hands over their heads to form a tunnel through which they took turns running while everyone sang words like I accept you as you are and There is no bridge we can’t cross together. Cass remembered the game because one of the older girls had tripped her, sticking out her foot as Cass ran through. Then she pretended to help her up, whispering, God hates dirty skanks like you.

  The likelihood of God’s affection for her was one of the subjects Cass took pains to avoid, but Lily seemed to be waiting for her to say something. “I know that one.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s a beautiful lesson. But now I would like you to let your mind disconnect from what you have learned in the past,” Lily encouraged. “Be open to what you will hear and see in the days to come. Be open to miracles-true miracles.”