Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

  Was he to blame? Jessica would have had him think so; but she blamed him for everything. Never mind that she kept the beautiful home in the mountains, the cars and clothes and club memberships. It wasn’t enough. The dissatisfied look he’d seen on her face since before Sammi was born-it was there, etched deeper than ever. He hadn’t made her happy. If he was honest, it had been years since he’d even tried.

  Ever since the divorce, Dor was the absent parent, the weekend visitor, the bringer of gifts and the merchant of affections, bargaining for his daughter’s attentions. He wasn’t the first man to make that bitter trade, and he accepted it as his due, for leaving them. He’d tried to appease Jessica by padding her support checks, paying the lawn service ahead, covering her insurance for the year. He’d learned to manage his ex-wife and daughter as well as could be expected, and now that Jessica was gone he would learn to manage Sammi again, once they were safe. Maybe the Box wouldn’t be such a bad place for them to get their footing…for a few days she would be a novelty, but his staff were loyal, and they would pick up on his cues and accept her and…hell, maybe she and Cass would form a friendship, maybe Sammi could help her in the garden. Maybe Cass could tutor her, if they could round up some textbooks. It wouldn’t have to be Cass, of course; Coral Anne had taught third grade, or James-he’d coached girls’ softball in high school. Well. Those were details. And Dor knew better than to start focusing on details when the job at hand was still the big picture.

  Big picture: things in Colima would go one of three ways. Easily, in which case they would soon be back here. Disastrously, in which case he would die, and presumably others as well, since failure was only an option after exhausting every other one. Or-and this was, of course, the most likely possibility-with difficulty and complications, starting over somewhere new if they got to start over at all. Each deviation from the plan, each small misstep or change of direction, would spiral outward in increasing magnitude, exacting changes he could not predict. A minor glitch could change the course of the entire operation, and this was what seized at Dor’s calm, what impelled him out into the night when he should be resting up for tomorrow.

  He walked quickly along the dark street, arcing his flashlight beam expertly, his strides long and sure. He had no particular destination in mind; he purposefully emptied his mind of as much as he could and waited to be drawn by some small signal. Dor did not believe in the supernatural, in psychic energy or parapsychology or anything like that, but he acknowledged that there was a level at which events eluded the senses that he, a human, possessed. On top of that, he believed that God, the One who seemed to have turned away from this ravaged planet, kept an inattentive eye on His creation; He might return at any time.

  Dor stayed on the sidewalks, passing landmarks he knew well. The moon was high and round and supplemented the light from his flashlight. There was the Laundromat with its hulking black shapes of washers and dryers silent and still through the broken windows. The Law Offices of Burris and Zieve, the sign curiously intact, gold letters inked on glass. The alley that led to a tiny restaurant where he had once taken a date, the finest restaurant in Silva, Spanish cuisine served on mismatched Limoges by pretty Portuguese sisters…they’d lit candles in iron holders in the alley and decorated it with pots of geraniums and ivy. His date had ordered flan; she’d also given wicked head. Dor didn’t remember anything else about her. Now the alley was choked with dead leaves and roof shingles, shell casings and a crushed bicycle.

  Dor looked away.

  They kept the close-in streets clean-picking up trash every week or so-but the farther one got from the Box the more the streets resembled the world at large, deteriorating like the set of one of those old Westerns, a ghost town. Dor walked west on Brookside, aiming more or less toward the boat dealership at the corner of Third and Industry; once he got there he would turn right and make a wide loop back to the front of the Box, where he’d enter without bothering to scale the fence. He didn’t care who knew he’d been out wandering, as long as they didn’t follow. The whole walk would take about forty-five minutes and might settle him enough to sleep, if he was lucky. On another night, he might have taken one of his private stash of Nembutals, if it got especially bad. But with what lay ahead he needed to keep his thoughts clear.

  A sound off to his right put him instantly on alert. His gun was in hand in seconds, his feet planted and ready to run. It was true that most people didn’t stand a chance in the face of Beaters’ pursuit, but Dor wasn’t most people…most people didn’t train with an army sniper and members of the Coast Guard, the highway patrol and the Norteños. Dor had survived more attacks than he could count on one hand, and he refused to stop his nighttime wandering even with the knowledge that nests lay hidden every few blocks. Beaters usually stayed put at night, their vision compromised by their malfunctioning irises, which let in only a tiny amount of light; they spent the dark hours piled and entwined in their nests of fetid rags, four and five of them at a time shuddering and moaning in their sleep, writhing and slapping at each other as their fevered minds dreamed their horrific dreams.

  This sound, as he stood still as stone and listened, was not a Beater’s sound. They whistled and snuffled and moaned and cried, but this was more shrill, almost a cawing. Dor walked toward it silently, a trick he’d mastered.

  Around a corner past the old doughnut shop the sounds grew louder and there, in the tiled entrance of an accountant’s office, was a jerking mass of ink-black shapes. A Beater nest. And those were bodies, two of them-that was a foot there, and another, one naked and the other still wearing a boot. There was little flesh on a foot and sometimes a Beater would not bother picking it clean if it was sated. It would leave the body in the nest after tearing the flesh from the poor person’s back and buttocks and arms, the soft skin of the stomach and thighs, until later, until it was hungry again. Then, it might return to chew the tougher and leaner bits from the wrists and the face and ankles.

  That’s what had happened here, Dor figured, to the pair of travelers who’d made it almost to the Box. They’d been felled in their last mile by a band of the monsters who’d dragged them to their nest and then, for reasons unknown, left them there half-ravaged while they went back out into the night.

  He looked closer, squinting at the shuddering pile. There, crowding the bodies and feasting on the organs, were birds like nothing Dor had ever seen, enormous black carrion birds resembling freakish outsized crows, wings quivering and flapping in ecstasy as they feasted.

  Dor watched in silence and queasy astonishment. He had seen a few varieties of birds around the Box, but nothing like this. There were people who greeted the arrival of every newly returned species with celebration. Cass was like that with her plants, and Smoke and the others took delight in bringing her seedlings and roots for her gardens, or packets of seed raided from hardware stores. Word of any animal sightings spread quickly; in the past month alone people had found small striped snakes and potato bugs and lizards, and there were even rumors of a dog who’d made a few appearances at the edge of town, skittish and scared.

  But these birds had to be two feet long. Their folded black wings would be as wide as a woman’s outstretched arms. And they were hungry. He watched one tug at an intestine, unspooling a grisly length as it stepped backward and then the others fell upon the strand and ate.

  Dor picked up a stone from the street and threw it, his aim sure and deadly. The stone struck one of the birds’ heads and it fell over, its wings and claws drawn up in death. The others squawked furiously and skittered backward, flapping and jumping, one or two flying up to the second floor windows.

  In the inadequate light of the moon and stars, Dor could not see much of the scene before him. He shone his flashlight beam on the bodies and wished he hadn’t.

  Dor had seen even more than most. He’d trained himself never to look away, to remain dispassionate in the face of horror and ruin. He’d been a baggerman, loading bodies on trucks when there was still gas t
o be had; he’d joined the crew that stacked and burned the dead. By then he’d moved out of the Silva house and into a friend’s vacant cabin up in Sykes, and there were no more client accounts to play with and no reliable power for his laptop, and he needed to find a way to stay busy. When they quit collecting the dead, he was among the first raiding parties, the ones who brought supplies to hospitals and nursing homes, until the hospitals and nursing homes were nothing but mausoleums themselves.

  He’d waited too long. He should have gone back to Silva while he still could, but in their last phone conversation, Jessica had told him to stay away. “Sammi’s already lost you once,” Jessica said. “She can’t lose you again. I’m telling her you’ll stay there, where you’re safe. Don’t make a liar out of me, Doran. Please.”

  He’d listened to Jessica and stayed. He threw himself into helping anyone in Sykes who asked, and when the weak and vulnerable had finally all died and there was nowhere else to volunteer, he set out for San Pedro, where he’d heard about a cult taking up residence in the Miners stadium. By then he’d already decided to become a trader. He talked a guy named Nolan from an A-frame down the road into coming with him, and they loaded down a shopping cart with loot from a dozen empty cabins, liquor and candy bars and sanitary pads and antifreeze and boxes of Band-Aids. They pushed the cart the few miles to Sykes in the middle of the night, a flashlight wired to the front of the cart, though they never switched it on, preferring to take their chances in the dark. Nolan had served in the Gulf, and he knew a few tricks for sheltering, which came in handy when they got to San Pedro and spent their first few nights in a little stucco house before they found the empty lot that would become the Box. Dor still thought of Nolan every time he passed that little house.

  The house where he’d come back from the creek carrying a bucket of water one morning shortly after they’d arrived and found nothing left of Nolan but the piss stain on the side of the wall where the Beaters had found him.

  That was a devastating sight, worse in some ways than the many dead he later saw during scavenging missions, desiccated skeletons lying in beds and slumped at tables and many, many who still hung where they’d rigged their own death ropes. He’d found the bodies of children in their mothers’ arms with holes in their skulls, and he’d smelled every taint of rot, of bodies trapped in cars and flooded basements and burned buildings. But he’d gotten through it.

  He’d seen what the Beaters did, and euthanized a dozen victims who’d been unlucky enough to live through an attack. He steeled himself, and he shot them with a steady hand and a merciful heart and still was able to eat and sleep and make love afterward.

  But now he looked upon two travelers who’d made it within a few blocks of safety only to be ravaged not once but twice, the remains abandoned by the Beaters only to be fought over by a species God or Nature had been careless or indifferent enough to allow to return, and Dor wondered if the balance had finally tipped to the other side, if all their work and vigilance and will to live would mean nothing, in the end, if each day or week would bring a new horror from the skies and the water and the land, and he would die as all the others had, without his daughter, without anything, and Dor turned and vomited on the street and the birds returned to their meal of carrion.

  11

  CASS DRESSED RUTHIE IN RED OVERALLS MEANT for a boy, with a truck appliquéd on the front. Underneath, two shirts. Over them, a parka with a soft band of fake fur edging the hood. Mittens on a cord looped through the jacket’s sleeves, and her too-tight boots were pulled on over long socks. Ruthie was too hot, but the pack was full to bursting with clothes and supplies and there was no room to stuff anything more inside.

  Dor came for them in the first light of morning, before Cass expected him and she was glad, because she left the tent without having time to look around one last time. The pack on her shoulders was heavy but she was strong, her work in the garden turning her shoulders and arms sinewy and sunbrown, and though it was a poor substitute for the long runs through the foothills she’d once loved, she ran around the perimeter of the Box in the early morning when almost no one else was awake.

  She was as fit as she had ever been-sober for nearly a year, her body free of any trace of the alcohol with which she had punished herself for so long. The kaysev diet seemed to do her good. The natural immunity that was the disease’s legacy kept her eyes and sinuses clear and her digestion regular. Her hair continued to grow at an astounding rate, and her nails were strong and hard and had to be trimmed constantly. Ruthie, too, was thriving, despite her silence-she’d grown an inch according to the pencil line Cass had drawn at the start of October on the bookshelf, and her molars had come in. Despite the occasionally restless night, Ruthie ate well and played energetically and these days she smiled more than she frowned.

  When the curtains over the door lifted and Dor stood in the doorway silhouetted against the pale light of dawn, Cass stood, ready to go. Ruthie stared up at Dor with her usual frank appraisal. Despite the cold, Dor was dressed only in a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and he held his parka over his arm. He had not cut his hair since Cass had first seen him, and it had grown in streaked with gray among the black and now it grazed his shoulders, the ends ragged and wet from his shower. The half dozen silver loops piercing the cartilage of his ears glinted in the light of her Coleman lantern, the use of which-with its hoarded batteries-was a special-day indulgence.

  “Show me your blade,” Dor commanded in a voice rusty from sleep, regarding her with an expression that suggested he was still making his mind up about the wisdom of bringing her along.

  Cass’s hand went automatically to her belt, which concealed a Bowen narrow double-edged blade. It too had been a gift from Smoke, traded for in a good-natured bidding war with a few of the guards. She held it out by the silver handle, its smooth curve familiar in her hand.

  Dor nodded. “That will do.”

  Cass replaced it. “What if it hadn’t?” she asked. “What if you didn’t like it?”

  Dor bent on one knee, and she couldn’t read his expression. He held out a hand to Ruthie, and to Cass’s surprise, her daughter slipped her hand into his and followed him from the tent.

  “I would have given you mine.”

  Joaquin, the early-shift guard, mumbled a sleepy greeting and opened the gate for Dor, looking at Cass and Ruthie curiously but asking no questions. They’d encountered no one else on the walk from Cass’s tent, though she knew that outside the Box two more guards patrolled, on the lookout for Beaters roused by the dawn’s light. Somewhere in the cheap cots that lined the front wall, someone moaned in their sleep, visited by some terror or regret as the buzz from the night before wore off. Elsewhere someone coughed. These were sounds one grew used to, living in quarters as close as these.

  Cass had not spent a night outside the Box since escaping from the Convent with Ruthie. She stared up at the darkened stadium across the street, a string of Christmas lights drooping from the upper tier the only illumination other than a faint glow from within. Somewhere inside, in the skyboxes where the highest members of the Order lived, Mother Cora slept the sound sleep of the devout, of someone confident that there was not only a higher power but a plan in which she played a vital role. Even her disastrous mistakes could not shake her convictions: Mother Cora had been wrong about the Beaters. She had been convinced they could be healed by prayer, a theological misjudgment that came with a very high price.

  Convent trade with the Box had been sharply curtailed since Cass left, with only a few furtive exchanges for cigarettes and the occasional cheap bottle of home brew. No new acolytes had been accepted; hopeful travelers were turned away at the heavily guarded and shuttered entrance-and no one had left-or been allowed to leave. Dor seemed indifferent; he had no special contempt for the Order, but he didn’t seem inclined to worry about their future, either, and his employees took their cues from him in this as in so many other things.

  Cass turned away from the stadium; there was n
othing there to mourn or miss. The flame of zealotry had burned out, and presumably their only prayer now was survival, as it was everywhere.

  “How far?”

  “Corner of Third and Dubost. Think she’ll let me carry her?”

  Cass had been about to pick Ruthie up herself when Dor swung her daughter up and over his head, resting her over his shoulders as though she weighed nothing. Ruthie’s eyes widened with surprise and she dug her fingers into Dor’s hair, holding on tightly. Dor winced but didn’t complain, even as she pulled tighter.

  Ruthie looked for a moment as though she might cry, but she set her mouth in a tight line and no sound escaped her. Dor walked slowly, taking care not to bounce her and after a moment she relaxed. She watched the scenery go by, her head turning this way and that, and Cass remembered that Ruthie had seen very little of the world outside. Once she relaxed and stopped gripping his hair so tightly, Dor closed his big hands around her chubby calves and moved a little faster.

  Cass tried not to stare at them. Smoke, who had no children of his own, no nieces or nephews, who had lived a businessman’s life of motels and airports and restaurant meals, had been finding his way slowly around Ruthie. Cass knew that he cared about her daughter, but he treated Ruthie with great care as though she was fragile, as though he would inadvertently, permanently damage her. He never carried her, though he would wait patiently for her when they walked through the Box. He played with her, setting up elaborate stage sets with the many toys the raiders brought back for her, but he never roughhoused. There was something about Ruthie’s silence that made him treat her with exaggerated care, as though muteness was evidence of delicacy or a tendency to injury, and when they played together he chose her Playmobil characters or crayons or board books. Ruthie never seemed to mind. She had become a serious child who did not seem to miss running and tumbling and climbing trees.